The displaying of paintings, sketches, photographs, and other images is very popular in business and personal settings. For example, most homes and offices have paintings or photographs on their walls. It can be very expensive, however, to purchase, maintain, and display high-quality paintings—so much so that most businesses and families cannot afford to do so. As a result, most images that are displayed are low-cost reproductions of high-quality paintings or originals of low-quality paintings. Because viewers can tire of seeing the same painting on a daily basis, some businesses change the location of the paintings that they display to provide more variety to their customers and employees.
Various electronic means have been used to display images to help reduce the cost of displaying images and increase the variety of images that are displayed. For example, slide programs for general-purpose computers have been developed to display images (e.g., stored in JPEG format) on display devices such as a computer monitor. These slide shows typically cycle through displaying a set of images (e.g., defined by a display list) at a fixed rate. Some electronic frames have been developed that allow a user to upload their own photographs for display on a screen within the frame. These electronic frames, much like a slide show program, cycle through displaying a set of photographs. It can be a time-consuming process, however, to change the set of images that are displayed either by a slide show program or an electronic picture frame. To change a set of images, a person may need to search for, pay for, and download an electronic version of an image and then create a display list that includes that image.
An image distribution system has been developed to distribute images from an image distribution server to image display clients. The distribution server periodically distributes packages of images to the image display clients for display on a display device (e.g., a high-resolution, flat-panel monitor). The distributor of the images may have licensed the images from various organizations, such as art museums, and needs to assure those organizations that the images will only be used as authorized by the license. It is important that the images be distributed to the image display clients and used by the image display clients in such a way as to ensure that only authorized use of the images is permitted. It would be desirable to have a technique for distributing the images to the image display clients in a way that would make unauthorized use virtually impossible.